


no traveller returns

by jouissant



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek: Into Darkness Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 15:55:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy comes to the conclusion that they'll all be much better off if Starfleet never finds out about Khan's superblood or the serum he derived from it. He enlists Spock to help him bury the secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no traveller returns

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt](http://strek-id-kink.livejournal.com/1695.html?thread=46239#t46239) at strek-id-kink.

“Okay,” McCoy said, stepping back from the biobed. “He’s stable. Now we just have to cool our heels and see what happens.” Easier said than done, he thought. There was a reason he spent so much time in his office in sickbay, and it wasn’t paperwork. Jim lay pale and still. A square translucent bandage on the inside of his elbow was the only relic of the transfusion that would hopefully save his life. McCoy looked around him. His team didn’t look much better than Jim. 

“I said okay,” he said. “You all look like the walking dead, and Lord knows we’ve seen more than enough of that today. So go eat something and hit the rack for a minimum of eight hours. That’s an order.” He looked around at the bulkheads, their smooth white curves scarred here and there with missing tiles and gnarled wiring. He doubted they’d be reporting back here for duty any time soon. 

When he was alone, McCoy went into his office and poured himself a drink with shaking hands. He came back out to Jim’s bedside, letting the drink sit until the ice melted and staring into space. What an absolute clusterfuck of a day, he thought. He let his head fall into his hands, too exhausted to think about making the trip up to deck 5 so he could follow his own orders. He was half-asleep sitting up when he sat bolt upright, casting about the room until he found it--the damn tribble. It was poking around over by the recycler.

Would you look at that, he thought. Lazarus, raised from the dead to clog up my sickbay like a horny dustbunny. Waste of a good resurrection. 

“And now I’m forever in your debt,” he said aloud. The tribble chirped at him. “Ah well,” McCoy said. “Better you than Khan.” He turned away from the tribble to the whirring centrifuge, hard at work. He’d have a new batch of serum ready tomorrow. He watched the blurry swirl of test tubes inside with a creeping sense of unease. He stood there in the empty room for a long time, listening to Jim’s respirator breathe for him. The unease grew to dread. He walked back to his desk, picked up his communicator, and commed Spock. 

McCoy had to hand it to Spock. If he was anything, he was responsive. In the early hours of ship’s-morning, when any sane and decent person should have been dead to the world, Spock answered McCoy’s comm nearly instantly. He limped into sickbay less than five minutes later. He looked like a vampire and an android had had a kid and entered it in a prizefight. 

“Lemme see that laceration on your nose,” McCoy said. “Someone should’ve sutured that.” 

Spock neatly sidestepped McCoy’s hand, though his proprioception seemed a little off and he almost tripped over a crash cart as he did so. He looked around, clearly disconcerted, and straightened his tunic. “If you called me down here to fret over minor injuries, I can assure you my time is better spent elsewhere,” he said. His eyes darted to the corner biobed, and he swallowed.  
“Will he live?” he asked quietly. 

“I hope so,” McCoy said. “It’s going to be touch and go for a little while. But he’s...he’s alive again, technically, and that’s a start.” 

Spock nodded, eyes still trained on Jim. He looked haunted.

McCoy sighed. “Look, Spock--”

“Why did you comm me, doctor?” Spock asked, turning away from the biobed. 

McCoy rubbed a hand over his face. “I was thinking,” he said. “What do you think ‘Fleet’s going to do when they find out what happened to Jim? When they find out how we brought him back? Do you really think Marcus went rogue all by himself here? Because I gotta say, I don’t, and it’s occurred to me that maybe we should be worried about that.” 

“I admit, I had not yet considered it,” Spock said. “I have been...preoccupied. However, upon reflection, I believe you are correct. It seems unlikely that Marcus operated in a vacuum.” He was quiet for a minute, appearing to weigh something over in his mind. He moved closer to McCoy. “What I am about to tell you, doctor, cannot leave this room,” he said. “In briefing Captain Kirk and myself, Admiral Marcus disclosed the existence of a covert division of Starfleet Intelligence known as Section 31,” he said. 

“You’re kidding me,” McCoy said. “That’s--that’s comic book stuff,” he said. “You’re telling me Section 31 exists?” 

“Indeed it does. And if Admiral Marcus was to be believed, Section 31 was instrumental in reanimating Khan and exploiting his...talents,” Spock said. “One can thus extrapolate the existence of an institutional framework designed specifically to integrate Khan’s contributions into Starfleet’s arsenal.” 

“I’m guessing Khan’s superblood would be right up their alley,” McCoy said. He looked at Spock, nodding tersely once. He was seized with a sudden resolve. “That’s why they’re not getting within a parsec of the stuff.” 

“As we are currently orbiting Earth, they are well within--”

“Literal as ever,” McCoy said. “Keep it up, Spock, it’s reassuring. Like I said, they’re not getting their hands on that serum. Which means they can’t find out about Jim realigning the warp cores, or dying, or any of the rest of it. Which _means_ ,” McCoy sighed, “you can’t include it in your report.” 

Spock straightened. “Doctor, as acting Captain, I am obligated to provide Starfleet Command with an accurate and comprehensive report of events as they occurred,” he said. 

McCoy jabbed a finger at Jim’s supine form. “Take a look at him. Think about everything he’s been through; everything he’s done for us. For _you_. Now think about him waking up-- _if_ he wakes up, Spock--and being hauled off to an underground bunker somewhere to be poked and prodded for who knows how long. Do you want to pick up the pieces of that shit show? Because I sure as hell don’t.” 

Spock paled, pressing his lips together bloodlessly. He said nothing. 

“Or if you’d prefer, I can appeal to the greater good,” McCoy continued, waving a hand for emphasis. “You didn’t want to take Khan out. You wanted to bring him back for trial. What if shoot first, ask questions later was our new mandate? That’s who we’re dealing with here, the kind of people who--”

“Thank you, Dr. McCoy,” Spock said. “Though hyperbolic, your argument has merit. I will consider the contents of my report carefully.” 

McCoy crossed his arms over his chest. “Good,” he said, slightly deflated by his abbreviated diatribe. “I wish I thought I was exaggerating, Spock,” he said quietly. 

Spock was quiet for a long moment. “Understood,” he said. He turned as if to leave, then appeared to think better of it and turned back to McCoy. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “If you believe that Jim’s well-being is not sufficient cause for me to keep this knowledge from Starfleet, you are very much mistaken,” he said. 

He looked McCoy in the eye, and McCoy had the distinct impression that acting Captain Spock had left the building, replaced by a man who had lately clawed back from the edge of something. 

“Okay,” McCoy said, hands outstretched like he was gentling an animal. “Okay.”

***

McCoy was at the replicator in the cafeteria when his comm chimed. He jumped, jostling his overfull coffee cup and sloshing scalding liquid all over his hand. Cursing, he set his coffee down on the nearest tabletop and wiped his hand off on his uniform, which up until now had been pristine white. Eight days and counting at Starfleet Medical hovering at Jim’s bedside wasn’t doing his nerves any favors. His comm chimed again, insistently, and he took it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “McCoy,” he said testily.

“Spock here,” Spock said. “I have completed my report, and I thought it might be prudent to...debrief you regarding its contents prior to submission.” 

McCoy glanced around furtively. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” he said. “I think we should get off campus, though.” He considered. “There’s a bar on the Embarcadero,” he said. “Pretty dive-y, Jim used to like it back at the academy. There’s a giant red statue of a rooster outside.” 

He could pretty much hear Spock’s eyebrow through the comm. 

“I will meet you there in fifteen minutes,” Spock said. 

McCoy got there in ten. It was mid-afternoon, and the bar was nearly empty. He ordered a drink and settled in a back booth. Spock slid into it across from him a few minutes later, looking askance at McCoy’s glass. “That is not your customary beverage,” he said. 

“I’m going back to the hospital after this,” McCoy said, glaring at his club soda. “So, let’s see this report of yours.” 

Spock passed McCoy his PADD across the table. They sat in silence as McCoy read through the report, Spock resting his hands on the table and idly tracing the grain of the wood with a fingertip as he waited. 

_”Exhaustion?”_

“Pardon?” Spock said, looking up. 

“Don’t ‘pardon’ me,” McCoy said. “You put down that Jim was hospitalized for exhaustion? You really think that’s going to fly?” 

“Captain Kirk was under immense stress, both physically and mentally,” Spock said. “It is plausible that he could have been pushed to the breaking point. You yourself have medical logs that put his vital signs beyond normal range. At any rate, I believe we will meet with a greater likelihood of success putting forth a reasonably mundane explanation than a complicated one.” 

He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “It is in the admiralty’s best interest to distance Starfleet as much as possible from recent events,” he said. “It has already proven difficult to explain away a falling starship of a scale most citizens, let alone most Starfleet officers, have never before seen. And that is a starship, not a man risen from the dead.” 

“You think they’ll realize that explanation holds water reasonably well and file it without looking too closely,” McCoy said. “You could be right.” He groaned. He was suddenly very tired. He needed to sleep for a week and forget space was somewhere it was even possible to go. “I don’t like it,” he said. “If what you told me about Section 31 is true, no one’s going to just forget that Khan existed.” 

“Vulcans do not believe in luck,” Spock said. “But were I to make an exception, I would stake my hopes on the fact that the _Enterprise_ is likely to be assigned a deep space exploratory mission should the captain recover. If we were to remain undetected long enough to ready the ship and depart, we might take advantage of the human expression--”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” McCoy finished. 

“Precisely.” 

McCoy took a deep breath. “And what if Jim doesn’t wake up?” 

“I have not factored that into my calculations at this time,” Spock said, looking down at his hands. 

McCoy smiled into his club soda.

***

He was staring out the window when he heard the rustle of sheets, followed by a single dry cough. McCoy wouldn’t admit it to a soul, but it was possibly the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, second only to Jo’s first indignant squall. He swallowed the lump in his throat before he turned around.

“Took your sweet time about it, didn’t you?” 

Jim’s adams-apple bobbed. He cast about the room, as if trying to reconcile his present surroundings with whatever he remembered. McCoy found himself hoping it wasn’t much. He moved to the sink, filling a glass with water and holding it to Jim’s lips. He drank, nodding his thanks when he finished. 

“I died,” Jim said, eyes wide, voice harsh like he’d been screaming. But they said it had been quiet, quiet and quick, and not for the first time McCoy thanked multiple deities that he had not been there in engineering to sear Jim’s silence into his memory forever. 

“Yeah,” McCoy said. “Yeah, you did.” 

“You--you brought me back?” 

“You could call it a group effort,” McCoy said. 

Jim looked up at him, drawn and too pale. “How?”

***

“Exhaustion?” Jim looked up from the PADD, regarding Spock incredulously. Spock looked like he wanted to shrug.

“He thinks it’ll go over better with the brass,” McCoy supplied. 

“Colloquial, but accurate,” said Spock. 

“Okay, but just so I have this right: I _died of radiation poisoning in front of you,_ after which you beamed down to the surface and had yourself an action-packed chase scene wherein you beat Khan’s ass. Thanks again for that, by the way.” 

“It was, as they say, the least I could do,” Spock said. McCoy thought he detected a trace of irony in his tone. 

“Meanwhile, Bones here figures out his tribble came back from the dead courtesy of Khan’s blood and decides to play guinea pig on my beautiful corpse.” 

“Please do not refer to yourself in that manner,” Spock muttered, tightening his grip on his stylus. 

“ _Whereupon_ , you and Uhura drag Khan back to the ship, Bones goes all Edward Jenner on Khan’s blood, and saves my life. And your report says I was voluntarily relieved of command and hospitalized for two weeks with exhaustion.” 

“How do you even know who Edward Jenner is?” McCoy said incredulously. “And yes, I’d say you’ve got the sequence of events down pretty much pat. Unfortunately I’ll never get that Nobel Prize in medicine for, oh, I don’t know, _curing death_ , but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.” 

“Bones,” Jim said, reaching out to tug gently at McCoy’s sleeve where his arms were crossed over his chest. His face was sober, chillingly so, and McCoy felt something in his gut twist. “Thank you,” Jim said. He looked at Spock. “Both of you. I know what this means--what this could mean, and--”

“Irrelevant,” Spock said. “We have done only what is necessary. Wouldn’t you agree, doctor?” 

McCoy nodded. "Yep." 

“I just have one last question, then I’ll let you two get back to this awesome bonding session you have going here.” Jim said. “How did you explain the warp cores coming back online?” 

“Keep reading,” Spock said. “What was the phrasing you provided me with?” he asked McCoy. 

McCoy grinned. “An act of God,” he said. 

Later, McCoy managed to cajole Jim into taking a nap. Spock still hovered by the head of the bed, looking like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. 

“Come on,” McCoy said. “He’s asleep. If we’re lucky, he’ll be asleep for awhile. His body’s still coming back from the serum; he needs all the rest he can get.” 

Spock didn’t move. 

McCoy sighed. Maybe he’d try a different tack. “Don’t you have a girlfriend to get back to?” 

“I believe Nyota would find it strange were I not here,” Spock said. “However, as the captain is unconscious...” He looked at Jim’s monitor. 

McCoy grabbed Spock by the arm and tugged. “You’re exhausted,” he said. “And we’re leaving.” Spock didn’t resist. 

They walked in silence to the turbolift. You might even call it companionable silence, McCoy thought. Huh. When they reached the lobby, the elevator doors opened and they stepped out into the hospital atrium. The setting sun was streaming in through the windows, and a crane from one of the cleanup crews poked out over the top of the adjacent building. 

Spock turned to McCoy. “Good evening, doctor. 

“Have a good night, Spock.” He turned and started for the doors, then stopped, whirling around to find Spock’s retreating back in the crowd. “Hey, Spock!” 

Spock turned, walking back toward him. 

“Thanks,” McCoy said, when he was close enough to hear. “For everything.” 

Spock hesitated a moment, then nodded. “And I thank you,” he said. His lips quirked upward. Then he turned away again and melted into the crowd. 

McCoy shook his head. “Deeply, _deeply_ uncomfortable,” he said to himself.


End file.
